Our process to manufacture this toy began with deciding which toy we were actually going to manufacture. Since two of the group members had similar toy concepts we thought it might be easier to combine the concepts for the manufactured product.

After deciding on the concept we drew up sketches in order to get rough dimensions for the product and decide what materials may work. The FDM machine seemed to be the best solution for the design that we created though we soon discovered that it was quite expensive and laborious. The $100 budget for the toy was quickly becoming the $100 budget just for the FDM parts. At $20 per cubic inch, our product was clearly going to have to be made with another material.

Scraps became our best friend as they didn't cost us any or very little money and were a lot easier to work with. We ended up finding a piece of scrap polyurethane foam that had a similar shape to the base of the boat so we decided to use that piece and machine it to fit into the dimensions we wanted. The milling took a little bit of time but it gave us a quick, finished product. The bandsaw was our other way of quickly getting things down to a specific size and/or shape. It does not make very accurate or straight cuts so we were limited in what we used it for based on the application of the cutting piece.

To secure all the elements together we used a hot glue gun. Other adhesives may have worked more effectively though the problem was adhering different kinds of materials with a durable bond. Since our time was running low and we didn't have the resources to obtain anything stronger we went with hot glue.

Overall, our process was a little up and down but we ended up with a finished product that looked like the drawing we had originally made. Through all the "strife" we discovered that sometimes doing things by hand is faster and a lot easier though it may not seem to be that way when deciding what processes to use.